The tension that Junts is experiencing in recent days, after the case of Francesc de Dalmases and his incident on TV3 was revived, has entered a standstill this Wednesday, waiting for new movements, but the division is clearly evident new to the formation. All this mess has reached the parliamentary group today, which has held an extraordinary meeting in which, in harmony with the leadership, it has opted to shelve the matter that concerns the now low deputy, who, incidentally, has been wished a speedy recovery from his sudden illness.
The atmosphere was heated in advance after Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas had accused other leaders earlier in the day of trying to topple Dalmases so that Laura Borràs would fall, who, as he said, is “big game”. He had also said in the microphones of Ser Catalunya that some former ministers must “digest” the departure of the Government. For her part, the lawyer Magda Oranich again charged the inks against Borràs and her surroundings on Ràdio 4 for the Dalmases episode and the pressure she received. The conclusion, more or less shared, is that the president of the formation is touched and her closest collaborator is as well.
After the conclave of the parliamentary group, it has been highlighted that “absolute respect is expressed and the decisions adopted by the executive” and by Dalmases are shared, and “the commitment and the will to continue working” has been reiterated from the opposition.
The fact of closing ranks with the decisions adopted by the executive and the attempt to return the water to its course responds to the complaints of some parliamentarians, who lament that all the work they do is clouded by noise and controversy. Also the exconsellera Lourdes Ciuró had pronounced in a similar sense these days, when she referred to the measures that they promote in relation to conflicting occupations, a matter in which they had tried to legislate from the Catalan Executive before the break with Esquerra.
The will of the management is that all this controversy ends here so as not to further damage the image of JxCat. However, there are elements that indicate that this might not be the case. The Parliament has yet to rule on Dalmases’ conduct in the Deputies’ Statute commission.
On the domestic side, the promoters of the resolution calling for Dalmases to resign as parliamentarian and wanting to force the issue to be addressed at the next meeting of the national council, in November, have sufficient support and are awaiting developments. They want the deputy to leave the act, not just the organic charge of him. Depending on what happens, they could present the signatures or not, although the will of the management is to deactivate the maneuver to calm things down.
Meanwhile, the Junts candidates in the municipal elections, for their part, are fed up with the entire debate revolving around internal controversies due to an unresolved conflict between sectors that is periodically reopened. “It doesn’t surprise me that Xavier Trias doesn’t say anything about his candidacy, he has to wait until the last minute so as not to get burned,” a local leader reflected this week. “All this harms us,” laments another who believes that the current situation is due to the fact that there was a pact between candidates instead of a confrontation of projects in the last congress that cleared the panorama.
In similar terms, Alonso-Cuevillas admitted this morning that “in Junts there are tensions” and pointed out that the breakup of the coalition had left wounds “that have yet to heal”. “That within Junts there are two souls is a notorious thing, although we try to camouflage it or pretend that we do not see it”, he concluded.
In the midst of the political storm there has also been room for a grotesque episode. Today a false profile has been unmasked on the networks that had obtained coverage of Borràs and those around him, who followed him.
An alleged journalist named Joana Masdeu, whom no one knows in Parliament and whom no political party has dealt with, relativized the Dalmases incident on TV3 on Tuesday and today accused other leaders such as Albert Batet and Jordi Sànchez of threatening and coercing deputies from Together. The former secretary general has offered her an interview and the account, which had been created this October, has disappeared at a stroke, although she had left some clues and was already the talk of the day in the corridors of the institution. A pretext that Sànchez has used to put in the spotlight other profiles that have anonymously criticized journalists and politicians and that have defended Borràs’ position, such as the Professor Torra account.
